A Dark-Adapted Eye

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Turned you down, has she?’

  ‘You can put it that way if you like.’

  ‘Faint heart never won fair lady, you know.’

  ‘Brave hearts don't always triumph either.’ Chad said this, it seemed to me, with infinite sadness. ‘There's a sort of prevailing belief,’ he said, ‘that if you want something enough, you can have it. Only try hard enough and you can have it. It just isn't true.’ He was one of those few, rare people I have known, the first of those few I have known, who could talk freely and without embarrassment about the emotions.

  My family, on an imaginary scale of openness, could have been placed on the other extreme end of it. My father could almost be seen to be curling himself back into his shell when Chad said this and Vera had begun to look angry, fierce in the old way I was used to. And then Chad smiled the smile that transformed him, making him look young and handsome.

  ‘Well, I have a train to catch,’ said my father.

  Chad stayed and we had one of Vera's magnificent teas, changed but not spoiled by austerity, the cakes made with mashed potato and dried egg tasting no less good. He produced one of those bottles of sherry and we wetted Jamie's head with it, there no longer being any talk of sending me to bed. But I couldn't forget what Mrs Cambus had hinted at and I found myself watching Vera and Chad for signs of the relationship she had seemed to suggest. Exactly what this relationship would be I was not clear about. All I knew of love affairs, clandestine and otherwise, was drawn from films. I was an ardent cinema- and theatre-goer. Adultery was a popular and compelling theme in the 1940s. It was the theme, whether the drama was historical or a light comedy or a war tragedy. If there were truly ‘anything between’ (Vera's own phrase) Vera and Chad I thought I would detect it. I thought, for instance, I might come into the room where they were and find them locked in each other's arms, only to spring guiltily apart at the sight of me. One thing I was certain of. I was too sophisticated, I thought, to be deceived as my father was into thinking it was Eden Chad was attached to. This was a mere blind, a cloak for his constant visits.

  Mrs Cambus's remark had given me a very unpleasant feeling. This had been blunted a bit but I still felt guilty and ashamed over my suspicions, though not enough to stop me watching and speculating. Vera, who had seemed to me ugly, old and worn-out when first I considered and dismissed this possibility, looked quite different now, years younger. To me, whose standards were high, formed by film-stars and Eden, she even seemed passably attractive, attractive at any rate enough. But if there were embraces, kisses, whispering together, I saw none of it. Nor was there any attempt to get rid of me and be alone.

  Helen came next day. She and the General came to lunch. She was elated, all laughter, hysterical with relief and happiness. Their son, Andrew, missing for weeks, his aircraft shot down somewhere over the Rhineland, was a prisoner in German hands. They had heard only that morning. There had been no more sinister explanation than this for the failure of the Chatterisses to attend the christening. Helen held Vera in her arms.

  ‘You were a brick, darling, not to mind. It is so splendid when the people one is close to understand. I just felt I couldn't go to the christening of someone else's boy when my own boy…’ She burst into wild sobs. Vera gave her some of Chad's sherry. The General patted her thin, shivering shoulders. ‘Oh, the relief! To know he's safe!’ Helen, too, can speak freely of the emotions, but only of a certain kind in a certain way, and that way widely acceptable.

  ‘Your Hun,’ said the General, ‘is widely reputed to be a gentleman.’ He lowered his voice when he said this. Perhaps he thought it came in the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ category. We were all mere women, though, we were safe.

  Helen, for some reason, had brought with her albums of photographs of her children, albums and loose snapshots, as if she had grabbed up anything she could find in the five minutes before leaving the house. Patricia, always said to be the favourite Chatteriss child, was ignored now. Andrew was all, Andrew in his pram, on his mother's lap, on a beach, in school uniform, in the uniform of a Pilot Officer, smiling, young, appearing too young to have been one of the Few. I would like to be able to say that I felt in looking at these pictures some stirring of expectation, some excitement, even some prevision of what was to come, but it would not be true. If I had thoughts of that kind, they were for Chad. As the object of my infatuation, he was beginning to replace Eden, who was growing shadowy, a voiceless, motionless, monochrome photograph with a long, pale fall of hair.

  But they talked of her, Vera and Helen, that afternoon, while the General fell asleep in an armchair and Jamie lay on a rug on the floor, waving his arms and kicking his legs. Vera's notions of what Eden's future life would be had changed since I last heard her speak in this way of her. Then she had said sadly she was sure Eden would never come back to live permanently in Sindon.

  Now it was different. She could have her old job back if she wanted it, she had written to Vera. And if that happened, where better to live than at Laurel Cottage? Eden was somewhere in Scotland at present. She, Vera, knew this because of the code they used, similar to the one she and Gerry had formulated. While she was speaking, Francis walked in. He arrived without warning, almost without sound, to my surprise going straight up to Helen and kissing her. I had never before seen him kiss anyone. She reached out to him one long, red-nailed, heavily ringed, delicate hand and would, I think, have told him at once about Andrew had Vera not still been speaking, continuing as if Francis had not come in, her tale of Eden's present whereabouts and occupation. It was the point about the code he seized on, though not to mock in the same way as he had done once before.

  ‘Let me tell you what happened to someone I know at school. His brother is a prisoner with the Japanese. This man, the prisoner, wrote to save the stamps off his letters for him when he got home, to steam them off. Well, they steamed this one off and underneath the man had written: “The Japs have cut out my tongue.”’

  Helen gave a cry of horror and flung her hands up to her throat. I, too, thought the story horrible. As you see, I have never forgotten it, preposterous though it was. I swear Vera gathered spittle in her mouth before she spoke to Francis.

  ‘It may interest you to know that your cousin Andrew is now a prisoner of war. Perhaps it will teach you to think of others before you speak. Now apologize at once to Aunt Helen.’

  Ironically, this was the only time I ever saw Francis obey his mother. Helen cried out:

  ‘Darling, he didn't mean it, he couldn't know!’

  ‘Helen, I am truly sorry,’ Francis said. He no more called her aunt than I did. Making it worse, ‘I could cut out my tongue. Oh, Christ,’ he said, ‘forgive me.’

  ‘He's in a German prison camp,’ Helen said.

  We did not know about the camps yet, nor about the implications of our own bombing of Dresden. Hiroshima was yet to come. We were innocent. Francis, who identified with Helen, who saw his own plight as an image of hers, as an identical link in the Longley chain of indifference or unkindness to children, had grown pale with wretchedness. His colouring was extraordinary, more spectacular than Eden's, the skin a fine, milky white, the hair so yellow, the eyes a hard violet blue. There was sweat in pinprick beads on his short, curled, upper lip. His were the features of Michelangelo's David in strange colours.

  He looked at the baby on the rug as if he would have liked to kick it. I felt a momentary real fear. Francis was so strange, so unlike other people. I could conceive of a situation in which he killed Jamie and then coolly informed Vera of what he had done. The General slept on, having in his sleep managed to smother his face with the Sunday Express. Jamie began to whimper and Vera immediately picked him up, holding him against her shoulder, his round cheek against her thin one. Helen said, the subject utterly changed though not much for the better:

  ‘You know, darling, I do believe his eyes are going to be brown. If they are, he'll be the first Longley to have brown eyes.’

  Francis, very still, watc
hed her.

  ‘I can't remember if Gerry has brown eyes,’ Helen said. ‘Isn't that too awful of me? Not to know the colour of one's brother-in-law's eyes? That's what war does for you. I do believe they are hazel. Is that right?’

  ‘My father's eyes are blue,’ said Francis in a dead voice. The sentence sounded curiously like the opening line of a play, a lost, never-acted Chekhov perhaps.

  Jamie, however, had closed his eyes and fallen asleep in Vera's arms.

  She breast-fed him. What will Daniel Stewart make of that? Jamie himself has made too much of it, to some extent a secure world. It has allowed him to shirk (what he calls ‘to face’) the truth about his mother. Francis, of course, denied that it ever happened. He remembered the feeding bottles boiled up on the kitchen stove in the big double-handled pans Vera used for jam-making. So do I remember. It has never been suggested that she had enough milk to feed Jamie without supplements. He got the ‘Government’ powdered milk in bottles as well. Eden was incredulous.

  ‘Vera feed Jamie?’ I remember her saying. ‘Like that, do you mean?’ And with the true vulgarity of the mealy-mouthed, she held up her hands, palms inwards, an inch from her own breasts. ‘Oh, never, impossible! Why, she didn't even do that for Francis!’

  I had never before seen a woman suckle a child. For one thing she would have had to be something of a Bohemian to have done so in the presence of anyone save her husband or her mother. There was no scooping up of tee-shirts in tube trains in the 1940s. It was a subject I had never really thought about, though breast-feeding was coming back into fashion. When I opened Vera's bedroom door in response to her ‘Come in!’ – I wanted to tell her I was going swimming with Anne – I was embarrassed by what I saw. It seemed to have a raw earthiness about it not associated with Longleys. I had noticed on my arrival a new plumpness about Vera's bosom. She had always been rather flat-chested. The round white breast Jamie sucked at would fill out the bodice of a dress becomingly alongside its fellow, this other not covered as one might have expected, knowing Vera's modest ways, but also bared and with a single drop of milk pendent from the nipple.

  Vera sat in a chair I had never seen before, a wooden one with a high back, squat legs and a round seat, a traditional old nursing chair that had in fact been used by my grandmother and her mother to suckle their babies. She sat upright, her legs spread apart, her head bent as she contemplated the steadily sucking child. He lay in the crook of her arm. Her other hand was lightly closed round the back of his fair, downy head. The look on her face I had never seen before, it was so young, so tender, so infinitely sweet and adoring.

  I wish now that we had spoken of what she was doing. It might have made things clearer, it might have helped. As it was, she said not a word, only seeming in a curious way to offer to my eyes the spectacle of this deeply physical, profoundly emotional act. I was shy, I looked away.

  ‘Is it all right if I go swimming?’ I said. ‘Down to the weir?’

  She looked up and smiled. She nodded. I got my swimming things and ran down the stairs. I think I ran most of the way to Anne's. It was not that I was so deeply embarrassed, certainly I was not shocked. My body seemed full of excited energy that had to be dispelled. It was the first time I had been to the river since my mother told me the story of Kathleen March. Because I couldn't imagine Vera with a baby, it had never seemed real to me. Now it did. My mother had not gone so far as to suggest that Vera herself had harmed the child, only that she had neglected to look after it. I asked Anne if she had ever heard the story, but in asking I left out mention of Vera, telling her only that a baby left in its pram on the bank here had been taken out of it and never seen again.

  Anne said she had heard about a lost baby but no details. We walked along the river bank to the part where, for some reason to do with a pumping station, the banks had been shored up and lined with concrete, creating a deep pool. There was so much more wild life then than there is now, such a proliferation of wild flowers and butterflies and dragonflies. The cleaning up of the English countryside, the sterilization had not yet begun. The hedges were still there and the deep, moist, unploughed water meadows. We watched a kingfisher swoop and flaunt its colours over the pool.

  ‘Vera is feeding Jamie herself,’ I said suddenly, I didn't know why. ‘With her own milk.’ I would have been shy to say ‘breast’ in front of Anne.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Anne said. ‘She told Mummy. She tells everyone.’

  I was surprised. I knew Vera disliked Mrs Cambus.

  We took off our clothes. We had our swimming costumes on under them. Anne could dive, though she had been told not to dive into the pool. She surfaced and said:

  ‘It's all babies, isn't it? There was Elsie's baby that never was and now there's your aunt's and there was the baby that disappeared. Have you done Macbeth at school?’

  It had been a set book for School Certificate – for her, apparently as well as for me.

  ‘Macbeth is full of babies and milk,’ said Anne. ‘You have a look. It's really strange that a play like that which is full of horrors should have all that babies and milk stuff, isn't it?’

  I asked her if she had thought that up for herself or had her English mistress told her? The English mistress, she admitted. I promised to look just the same, for Vera's story was full of babies and milk, too.

  The day after I went home I went to the theatre. That was my year for going to the theatre on most Saturdays. It sounds grand but in fact what I was doing was going in the gallery, queueing up for a stool first thing in the morning, securing my seat on what seems a pittance now, half a crown or three shillings, and often attending a matinée as well as an evening performance. Two or three of us, all school friends, would go.

  I wish I could positively remember what I saw that Saturday night. I think it was at the Cambridge and I think it was a musical called Song of Norway. Daniel Stewart can check up on that if he thinks what I have to tell him about that night is relevant. I saw so many plays that year and the year before and the year or two afterwards: Richardson and Olivier at the New in the Shakespeare Historicals and Oedipus Rex and The Critic, Blithe Spirit at the Piccadilly and Private Lives at the Fortune. But I know it was a musical I saw that night and in a big theatre where the gallery was up in the sky and to look down over the rail gave you vertigo even if you had a head for heights. We were lucky. We were in the middle of the front row.

  Someone said, quoting Lear, which we had recently seen:

  ‘How fearful and dizzy 'tis

  To cast one's eyes so low…’

  We were all, of course, casting our eyes down over the rail on to the tops of heads in the stalls far below us. The temptation was to drop things on to those heads, orange pips being traditional. None of us had seen an orange for years. I looked down on a golden head and as I did so, it turned to look upwards, though attempting nothing higher than the dress circle. The head was Eden's.

  My reaction was rather strange. I immediately – with a jerk, I think – looked away and sat back in my seat. There was nothing to look at up there but the ceiling, the usual ornate baroque mingling of cherubs and flowers. I made myself look down again and the head was still there, still turned, with the chin lifted. There was no doubt it was Eden. The chignon had just come into fashion and her hair was done up in one, the crown of it a study in complexities, curls and swirls nestling in a deep wave, almost as if designed for an aerial viewing. Veronica Lake had given place to Alexis Smith. I could not see what she was wearing, only that it was white and of some soft, thin material. What it definitely was not was a WRNS uniform. The man sitting next to her was her escort. I knew that because I saw him touch her. Her head was turned towards him. She must have got something in her eye. Their faces came very close as his hand, holding a radiantly white handkerchief, a handkerchief that positively gleamed down there among the blacks and golds and dark colours, approached her eye and, no doubt dextrously, made to remove the lash or grain of dust. I was at once convinced, for no more rea
son than this, that he must be a doctor. He wore a dark suit. The top of his head had a small bald spot in the middle of brown curls.

  The lights dimmed and went out and the curtain came up. I couldn't quite put them from my mind. The play couldn't dispel them. The extraordinary thing was that I was very certain I did not want Eden to see me. I sensed, you see, that she didn't want it known she was in London and would hate to have me see her. She was in Londonderry or else she was in Scotland. Had Vera not told me, less than two weeks ago, that she was in Scotland and having recently had leave could expect no more yet?

  There were two intervals. I was relatively safe from being seen because of the segregation of the audience in the stalls, dress circle and upper circle from us poor galleryites who even had to use a different entrance door. Nevertheless, I dreaded running into Eden and her doctor friend. Somehow I knew that if this happened, Eden would take me aside and tell me lies. How I knew this I don't know but I did. She would ask me not to tell Vera or my father that I had seen her and then give me a totally fabricated reason why I was to say nothing, such as that she was in London on some secret matter to do with the war. This I was afraid of, perhaps because I still kept the remnants of my ‘crush’ and total disillusionment is something one never courts even if one desires it. In the second interval I stayed behind in the auditorium while the others went out.

  Why had I forgotten that the greatest risk would be afterwards, outside in the street? I had. I felt that the danger was over when the curtain fell and we stood for the National Anthem, which in those days was always played.

  It may have been the Strand outside or Shaftesbury Avenue or the Haymarket. But I think it was the Charing Cross Road where Shaftesbury Avenue comes into it at Cambridge Circus. The long tyranny of the blackout had almost come to an end by then and a dim-out was to be allowed in its place. At the end of August, though – and for weeks to come due to a shortage of manpower and light bulbs – the West End continued in darkness. There was a full moon that night, and the moon was not obscured then by smog and pollution. We walked along the pavement with the crowd. It seemed to part as if by some stage instruction or command from a director, and there on the edge of the pavement in front of me stood the two of them, waiting to cross, her arm in his. In these days they would have been waiting for a taxi; then, they were making for a tube station, probably Leicester Square.